LinkedIn Tip: Beware the “Person I Trust” Virus!

LinkedIn Tip: Beware the “Person I Trust” Virus!

Hi folks–anybody else starting to see some LinkedIn invitations showing up in your inbox, from people you’ve never heard of previously, with the following message attached?

“Since you are a person I trust, I wanted to invite you to join my network on LinkedIn.”

I’ve had three recent invitations come in that contain this exact message, which pretty much suggests that it’s a virus of some kind, since it’s not the default LinkedIn invitation script — and I doubt three random individuals would just HAPPEN to stumble on using the exact same wording in this kind of a request.

And while I wasn’t able to find any official acknowledgment of this issue from LinkedIn, themselves, I did turn up a discussion thread here back in January that talks about the problem a bit. The general consensus of the people who responded to this article suggests that these invitations might be a form of spam, versus a virus, but either way I’d encourage anybody who receives a message with this note attached to just ignore it, as I have.

At the end of the day, it seems unlikely that accepting a LinkedIn request could do any actual damage to your system, so I’m not worried about that aspect — but I also don’t want you all spending time frantically trying to remember how you might know the person in question, either! That’s what I did, the first time I saw the message, since it sounded like somebody went to some trouble to personalize things. Then when I saw another exact copy of this note come in a day or two later, I knew something fishy was going on.

Just a word of warning, for anybody who might run into this issue!

By Joe User|
2016-10-20T17:37:50+00:00 August 29th, 2011|LinkedIn Tips|Comments Off on LinkedIn Tip: Beware the “Person I Trust” Virus!